Tom Grant's Blog

Frittering away the time with an experimentAll experiments involving donuts are worth doing, so here's one you might try. Tomorrow, bring a box of donuts to work, and leave them in the kitchen. At the end of the day, go back to the kitchen and count the number of donuts that people have taken.

Next week, pick a meeting-filled day, and bring a new box of donuts to all of them. Don't leave the donuts in the kitchen--the point is to keep it visible at all times. At the end of the day, count the number of donuts consumed.

Chances are that the number of donuts consumed in Week One is greater than the number consumed in Week Two, for an obvious reason. People behave differently when they are observed. We like the donuts, but we don't like being seen taking a donut (Homer Simpson excluded).

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2009 might be, in the Chinese calendar, the Year of the Ox, but January feels like the Month of PowerPoint. I've been doing a lot of speaking lately, including last week's great session about Lean and Agile in San Diego. (And thanks again to Rober Pryor of the San Diego Software Industry Council for the invitation.)

A small presentation to some Forrester clients about the state of the technology market, including where the opportunities lie, from a geographic, vertical, and solution perspective. Plus a few tips on how to emerge from the downturn a stronger company.

Most product management aficianados opine, at some point, about the importance of product passion. You need to love your product. You need to embrace it, nurture it, defend it, extol its virtues to other people. If your product fails, maybe you didn't believe in it enough. (You probably killed Tinkerbell, too, you unfeeling bastard.) If the product succeeds, you can bask in the afterglow, and then maybe have a cigarette.

If that sounds a little creepy, maybe it's worth re-evaluating your relationship with your product. I'm exaggerating for effect, but that's only because the word "passion" is vague, and exhortations to have product passion often sound pretty overheated.

Forrester analysts, Chris Mines in particular, have been publishing no small number of studies about Green IT. What was missing, I thought, was where the technology industry fits into one of the few parts of the economy that's likely to grow over the next couple of years. Public investment will accelerate growth in this market, but there won't be one big Manhattan Project-style program. Therefore, if you're not familiar with this market, it might be hard to figure out where to start.

Many product managers who work with or within Agile teams have told me how they've felt left in the dust during the early phases of the Agile implementation. "We've sighted our target persona!"the development team exclaims. "Champagne for everyone!"

Unfortunately, they forget to invite to these festivities the very person who will, beyond this sighting, provide ongoing intelligence about that role--and the use cases, and whether that's the right role for the product, and what the competition is doing to serve that person, and whether there's a market for all this technology in the first place. A good product manager also has mad skillz in collecting and analyzing this information, something that even the most wunderbar of Wunderkinder doesn't necessarily have right out of the womb.

Shane Hastie at InfoIQ describes the same problem facing business analysts, the cousins of product managers in IT organizations.

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Our survey about Agile's effect on the structure and operations of technology companies is now live. If you're interested in participating, here's the link. If you have questions or technical problems, please contact Zachary Reiss-Davis.

Who should take this survey? Since we're interested in the ripple effects outside of the development team, practically anyone in a company that has adopted Agile. The broader the sample of different roles, the better. Please forward the link to anyone who might have something to say on the topic. Affected or unaffected, happy or unhappy with the results, we're interested.

Also, my colleague Dave West is running a different Agile survey. In his case, the topic is limited in focus to development teams, and not just within the technology industry. if you're interested, please contact David D'Silva.

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I'm growing fond of Twitter, particularly since it's a great tool for overhearing what's on the minds of people involved in a particular line of work--including, oh, say, product management. This morning, I followed a Twitter-posted link to Brian Lawley's "Product Management Manifesto." If future historians wanted to learn about the product management profession, both the good and the bad, the Manifesto might be a key piece of evidence.

That's not a good thing. The "Manifesto" may reflect the current state of product management, but it's a bad manifesto.

What Is And Isn't A Manifesto

For people reading this blog, the word manifesto probably conjures up two main examples, Agile and Communist. In both cases, the manifesto is intended to be a plan for collective action. Today, we follow a long-term development plan. Tomorrow, we start using a more adaptive process. Today, we work on the assembly and hope our lives will improve will get better. Tomorrow, we march on the factory owner's office, or the tsar's Winter Palace.

The "Product Management Manifesto" is really a personal oath. Statements like, "I refuse to settle for mediocrity," or, "I believe that Product Management is one of the toughest, yet most rewarding jobs in the world," sound more like personal statements of dedication, bordering on professions of belief.

Here's some text excerpted from some other oaths, just to drive home the point further:

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The Cranky Product Manager has been posting up a storm lately, with several excellent ones in the last month. For personal self-interest alone, it's worth digesting what she has to say in her post about being the CEO of your own career. Plus, there are the results of her poll on PM certification. Go read.

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The vast majority of people who read this blog are undoubtedly involved in some aspect of sales enablement. I'm tempted to add, "Whether you like it or not," but most PMs enjoy that part of the job, even though they might do a little too much of it.

Therefore, we'd be grateful to hear what research we have planned for the future would be most helpful to you, the sales enablers...Er, the PMs who help enable sales. Forrester takes the "Client Choice" channel of communication with the outside world very seriously. We want to keep producing research that answers the most pressing questions on your mind. Click below to state your preferences.

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Saeed's recent post on the triumvirate of Sales, Marketing, and PM contains laudable suggestions for how PM can work better with these other groups. When he starts talking about the rocky relationship between Sales and Marketing, I worry that some hapless PM might read this post and think about playing peacekeeping force between these warring factions.

My frank advice: don't try to be the hero that ends the frictions between these two groups. At some point, they might ask you for help in some project that might help settle their differences. However, as in all troubled relationships, they must want to change for this sort of activity to be worthwhile. PM has enough challenges of its own, and it has little leverage or no over either of these organizations.